Broader Historical Narrative Research Articles

Forgotten Truth

The Haitian Revolution stands as an important event in the history of the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade due to it being the first successful slave revolt resulting in complete independence from the former slave society. This paper, follows the cultural history of the Haitian Revolution by analyzing political femininity present within Saint-Domingue/Haiti pre, mid, and post-revolution in order to bring forward female Haitian political actors. By examining how gender influenced the Haitian Revolution, a broader historical narrative is formed, one that accounts for intersectional perspectives and understandings to better conceptualize the whole history of the Haitian Revolution. This paper seeks to preserve the often-forgotten female legacies by analyzing primary sources written directly on the Haitian revolution and secondary sources written by historians specializing in either Trans-Atlantic or gendered histories.

Recognition and Respect: Contextualizing the History and Contributions of Black American Plastic Surgeons.

Recently, there has been heightened interest in the history of Black American plastic surgeons and their contributions to the field of plastic and reconstructive surgery (PRS). Despite the increased awareness and attention toward the lack of racial and ethnic diversity of the PRS workforce, the history of how PRS became one of the most ethnically segregated surgical specialties remains unexplored. Here, we outline the various political and cultural factors that contributed to the exclusion of Black practitioners from American PRS professional societies. This work contextualizes the rise of American PRS within the Jim Crow era and highlights the cultural significance of reconstructive procedures performed in the treatment of disfigured soldiers. Through this lens, we identify circumstances where Black surgeons were systematically denied opportunities to participate in the emerging specialty. Despite these barriers, we demonstrate how Black physicians established informal networks for professional advancement and shed light on several previously unrecognized contributions to PRS from Black surgeons. In addition, we explore how the inclusion of Black voices in PRS sparked a paradigm shift in the treatment of non-White patients that expanded the cosmetic marketplace in ways that remain significant today. Finally, we situate the ongoing disparities in Black representation in PRS within a broader historical narrative and illustrate how the stories we tell about our past continue to shape the future of our field.

Spaces to play: football as political protest in Kaouther Adimi's Les petits de Décembre

ABSTRACT Critical reception of Kaouther Adimi’s 2019 novel Les petits de Décembre has focused on elements of the story about a youth-led protest that seemed to anticipate the hirak movement of 2019. This article argues that the novel is in fact in dialogue with a much broader historical narrative around the use of football, and other playful techniques of resistance, as a means of political protest in Algeria. From the famous FLN team of the 1950s and 60s, to the stadium chants of the 1980s and 1990s, and up to the present day, the sport has loomed large in the country's histories of political resistance. Adimi's novel focuses on a less-expected kind of football narrative, however: the story of three small children who stage football matches as pacifist resistance to the planned takeover of their neighbourhood empty lot. The novel posits sports and play as a tool for the most disenfranchised to impose themselves on the Algerian political landscape and disrupt state control of public space, while also exploring how a global sport operates within a local landscape. As such, Adimi's work represents the possibility of a revolutionary approach to writing resistance in Algeria: via the history of hyper-local informal play and sport practice. The novel's style of writing, with its playful and entertaining prose, also invites readers to consider how a new generation is shaping the diffusion of Algerian narratives of football and resistance.

Finding the Social Life of Rural Non-Elites in Roman Italy

Scholarship generally places peasants on a spectrum of socio-economic independence and dependence. While opinions are shifting away from subsistence, self-sufficiency, and socio-political autarky as mainstays of the peasant condition, the conventional focus on hierarchical relations persists, leaving horizontal or ‘relational’ ones neglected. To address this imbalance, I first detail our need to deal with literary (self-) representations of rural non-elite life. I use Dio Chrysostom’s Euboean discourse to develop a non-exhaustive range of peer-level interactions including hospitality, reciprocity, and cooperative work. Archaeology can help unravel how these played out, but as site 9 from the Ager Lunensis shows, we need better evidence. Nevertheless, I offer tentative possibilities about veteran interactions and the dynamics between villa and small farm workers from site 154 from the Ager Capenas and Case Nuove from the Roman Peasant Project. I close by alluding to the potential of integrating horizontal social relations in broader historical narratives.

The Precious Seed of Christian Virtue: Charity, Disability, and Belonging in Guatemala, 1871–1947

AbstractThis article addresses the role of disability and disabled people in the construction of citizenship and nation through the ideologies and practices of charity from the 1870s through the 1940s. These periods of Guatemalan history are generally thought of as distinct: the Liberal triumph over Conservatives, Liberal dictatorship, and democratic revolution. To the contrary, practices of charity reveal the continuity of these political forms. This article explains the three models of charity that characterized modern Guatemala—caridad, beneficencia, and asistencia social—and outlines how they reflected understandings of the relationship between individuals and the state. It also provides a window into the daily lives of patients at the nation's insane asylum, leprosarium, and general hospital, who were not merely objects of charity but also political subjects who engaged charity models to gain access to resources, people, and mobility. In sum, this article integrates disability into broader historical narratives.

Liquidating Bankers' Acceptances: International Crisis, Doctrinal Conflict and American Exceptionalism in the Federal Reserve 1913-1932

This paper seeks to explain the collapse of the market for bankers’ acceptances between 1931 and 1932 by tracing the doctrinal foundations of Federal Reserve policy and regulations back to the Federal Reserve Act of 1913. I argue that a determinant of the collapse of the market was Carter Glass’ and Henry P. Willis’ insistence on one specific interpretation of the “real bills doctrine”, the idea that the financial system should be organized around commercial bills. The Glass- Willis doctrine, which stressed non-intervention and the self-liquidating nature of real bills, created doubts about the eligibility of frozen acceptances for purchase and rediscount at the Reserve Banks and caused accepting banks to curtail their supply to the market. The Glass-Willis doctrine is embedded in a broader historical narrative that links Woodrow Wilson’s approach to foreign policy with the collapse of the international order in 1931.

Expressive Currencies: Artistic Transactions and Transformations of Warrior-Inspired Masquerades in Calabar

Expressive Currencies: Artistic Transactions and Transformations of Warrior-Inspired Masquerades in Calabar

The Law (?) of the Lincoln Assassination

Shortly after John Wilkes Booth killed Abraham Lincoln, President Andrew Johnson directed that Booth’s alleged coconspirators be tried in a makeshift military tribunal, rather than in the Article III court that was open for business just a few blocks from Ford’s Theater. Johnson’s decision implicated a fundamental constitutional question that had been a source of heated debate throughout the Civil War: When, if ever, may the federal government circumvent Article III’s requirements of a criminal trial by jury, with an independent, tenure-protected judge presiding, by trying individuals other than members of the armed forces in a military tribunal?This Article III question has been debated in several of the nation’s major wars, yet remains unresolved, particularly with respect to the trial of domestic-law offenses. Moreover, that question is especially significant in the United States’ current armed conflicts against nonstate terrorist organizations, such as al Qaeda, both because members of such enemy forces, who lack international law “combatant immunity,” often violate U.S. criminal laws, and because Congress has recently authorized military commissions to try such enemy forces for certain domestic-law, war-related offenses. In attempting to justify the constitutionality of such military trials, the government has, perhaps surprisingly, turned to the Lincoln assassination commission as a leading precedent, one that arguably helps to establish a longstanding political branch practice that should inform constitutional understandings. Such reliance on the Lincoln trial as legal authority is understandable, because that proceeding was, in Judge Kavanaugh’s words, “the highest-profile and most important U.S. military commission precedent in American history,” and thus it would be striking — indeed, a significant constitutional embarrassment — to conclude that the trial and convictions of the Lincoln conspirators were unlawful.As I demonstrate in this article, however, such respect for the Lincoln assassination trial as a canonical constitutional precedent would itself be historically anomalous. For almost 150 years it was virtually unthinkable for anyone to rely upon that proceeding as venerated legal authority: as one knowledgeable observer wrote, the Lincoln trial was a case of military jurisdiction that “no self-respecting military lawyer [would] look straight in the eye.”This article offers the first comprehensive account of the ways in which the Article III question was contested during and immediately after the Civil War, with particular attention to the Lincoln assassination trial. The article also carefully examines the place of the Lincoln trial in the national constitutional discourse after 1868 — the ways in which that proceeding, and other Civil War military trials, have been accorded authority, or dismissed as nonauthoritative, by later generations. This broader historical narrative thus can help inform current academic and judicial debates about whether and under what circumstances political branch practice, especially high-profile precedents, ought to inform, or “liquidate,” the meaning or proper application of the Constitution.

Wicked Overseers

In recent times, several tragic events have brought attention to the relationship between policing and racial/ethnic minorities in the United States. Scholars, activists, and pundits have clamored to explain tensions that have arisen from these police-related deaths. The authors contribute to the discussion by asserting that contemporary policing in America, and its relationship to racial inequality, is only the latest chapter in a broader historical narrative in which the police constitute the front line of a race- and class-stratified social order. In other words, contemporary criminal justice and race struggles are a legacy of colonialism. This essay begins with a brief overview of colonialism before turning toward dissecting the contemporary colonial character of policing African American urban ghetto communities in four parts. First, the emergence of ghettos as internal colonies is described. Second, mechanisms are given that propelled the mass entry of police into ghetto spaces, with particular attention given to the war on drugs, broken-windows and order-maintenance policing, and police militarization. Third, the authors explore how contemporary policing acts to manage the colonized through police stops, searches, and other practices. Finally, the relationship between American policing practices and cultural denigration of African Americans is described.

A Sense of the Heart: Christian Religious Experience in the United States by Bill J. Leonard

Reviewed by: A Sense of the Heart: Christian Religious Experience in the United States by Bill J. Leonard Emily Suzanne Clark A Sense of the Heart: Christian Religious Experience in the United States. By Bill J. Leonard. (Nashville: Abingdon Press. 2014. Pp. xii, 380. $45.00 paperback. ISBN 978-1-4267-5490-6). In A Sense of the Heart: Christian Religious Experience in the United States Bill Leonard offers a broad historical narrative that seeks “to define, describe, and analyze various elements of religious experience across a wide spectrum of religious communities where varying expressions of religious liberty and pluralism exist” (p. 3). Traversing the Atlantic Ocean, the book begins in sixteenth-century Europe and ends with the spiritual seekers of twenty-first-century America. Leonard provides a readable and approachable overview that will make an excellent read for those interested in learning about Christianity in America and will work well in an undergraduate classroom. Readers who are well versed in American Christian history will recognize all the usual suspects and key players, but they likely will learn some new, interesting details along the way. The first chapter outlines what Leonard means by the term religious experience with nods to William James, Mircea Eliade, Ann Taves, Rudolph Otto, and others. In short, Leonard is not interested in doctrine and dogma; rather, he focuses on what Christians did and how they felt. With such an aim, it is no surprise that the book’s title comes from Jonathan Edwards’s 1746 work A Treatise on Religious Affections (and Leonard references Edwards throughout the book). The chapters that follow take the reader through American Christian history and cover a wide range of individuals and communities. Chapters are both thematic and chronological, and they center on topics like colonial America, revivalism, liberal or esoteric Christian experience (transcendentalism and spiritualism), communitarianism, African American Christianity, Pentecostalism, Catholicism, and modern-day America. This is a wide range of American Christians and experiences, and Leonard brings them together in a narrative that reads and flows with [End Page 638] ease. Readers of The Catholic Historical Review will be particularly interested in chapter 9, which describes the development of American Catholicism, including John Gother’s colonial “Garden of the Soul” devotions, nineteenth-century immigration, Dorothy Day and Catholic social justice, the Second Vatican Council, and Thomas Merton. Despite the book’s attention to Christian diversity, it is still a traditional narrative of American Christianity. Although there is reference to colonial missions to Indians, Native Christian voices are noticeably lacking in A Sense of the Heart. At the close of the book’s first chapter, Leonard notes that his narrative will examine “the nature and diversity of religious experience in light of such distinct religiocultural issues as pluralism, voluntarism, religious freedom, democratic idealism, and Protestant privilege in the US” (p. 22). In light of the missing Indian experiences and the single chapter on black Christians, it might have been more accurate to write “white Protestant privilege.” Although it is a traditional story of American Christianity, with supplemental readings the book will work well in an undergraduate classroom. It provides a solid base narrative and introduces students to various theoretical ideas about religious experience. Leonard’s clear distillation of James, Taves, and others in chapter 1 provides a primer for reading and analyzing the religious experiences that abound in the following chapters. Emily Suzanne Clark Gonzaga University Copyright © 2016 The Catholic University of America Press

Marriage Equality on the Arc of Civil Rights History: A Broad Historical Narrative

This essay summarizes the thesis of a much longer article, Advocacy for Marriage Equality: The Power of a Broad Historical Narrative During a Transitional Period in Civil Rights, 2015 Mich. St. L. Rev 1249 (2015). Previous civil rights movements in the United States define broad historical patterns that form a narrative helpful to a proper understanding of new controversies. As a society we often could benefit from a reminder that our actions today will form the history for future generations, who will judge us with benefit of hindsight and a broader perspective. With each new civil rights controversy, we owe it to ourselves and to the victims of discrimination to ask whether we are once again in a period of transition, where conventional mores will soon sound as jarring as Justice Bradley’s concurrence in Bradwell v. Illinois sounds to us now.

Deep-Seated Barriers to End-of-Life Care Improvement in the Twenty-first Century

Deep-Seated Barriers to End-of-Life Care Improvement in the Twenty-first Century David Clark (bio) Emily K. Abel. The Inevitable Hour: A History of Caring for Dying Patients in America. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2013. viii + 226 pp. Illustrations, notes, and index. $32.95. By the late nineteenth century, the people of Europe and North America were living longer and had rising expectations of health and well-being, but with the benefits of longevity and the diminished threat of early death came other consequences. The predominant causes of death started to shift ground—from the sudden demise brought on by infection, disaster, and plague to protracted dying associated with the emerging chronic diseases of the modern era—not least cancer and tuberculosis. Whereas in the Middle Ages in Europe, the death that came too swiftly was something to be feared and defended against, now concerns began to grow about lengthy dying and the suffering it might entail. Mid–nineteenth-century popular culture presented idealized images of a slow and controlled farewell to the world, with family members gathered around and confidence in a passage to another and better world. But, by the close of the century, preoccupations were emerging about the manner of dying—now coming to be seen not only as a social and cultural event but also as potentially a medical process. This brought growing unease in the disposition towards dying. Changing personnel around the deathbed, secrecy about the imminence of death, as well as the desire to quell the threat of pain and suffering—all reveal a new anxiety that opened up a space for medical intervention. The nineteenth century, for the French historian Phillipe Ariès, was associated with the emergence of new sentimental orientations to death that reflected, in particular, major changes within the culture and structure of family life. As the meaning of family relationships deepened and became more nuanced, parting with a dying relative and subsequent grief for that loss became increasingly emotional and expressive. A growing emphasis fell on the emotional pain of separation and on keeping the dead alive in memory. This was enhanced by new developments in photography that enabled carefully staged postmortem images to be captured and preserved for posterity. It also meant elaborate rituals of mourning and funeral observance as well [End Page 751] as the emergence of the cult of the grave as a family resting-place. Undoubtedly, it led to new representations of the deathbed itself. The wider Romantic movement contributed to notions of the “beautiful death,” to la mort de toi (“thy death”) personified in the death of a loved one. Ariès also showed that, in the nineteenth century, the rise of modern science brought challenges to religious authority and, specifically, in this context, to the necessity of dying in the presence of the official representatives of formal religion. For Ariès, medical men began to replace priests, clergy, and ministers at the bedsides of the dying. But this created a moral vacuum. For if the role of medicine was to focus on the technical preoccupations of attending to the relief of pain and the easing of physical distress, who was to address the fears of the dying, the distress of the bereaved, and the achievement of the “good death”? There has been a tendency to see this as the period in which dying was drained of meaning by science and medicine—forcing life’s end to retreat from its public and family dimensions into the sequestered spaces of hospitals and other institutions. This was also strengthened by the growing tendency to shield the dying person from the reality of their fate. For Ariès, the mid-nineteenth century was therefore the origin of “the lie” wherein the gravity of the dying person’s situation was kept from them—and death was on the way to becoming “shameful and forbidden.” Emily Abel’s thoroughly researched book steps into this broad historical narrative and gives context, detail, and definition. Focused on the American experience, and with some stretching of the period at either end, she takes us from the close of the nineteenth century to the mid-1960s, explaining how the movement...

Nurses Across Borders: Displaced Russian and Soviet Nurses after World War I and World War II

Russian and Soviet nurse refugees faced myriad challenges attempting to become registered nurses in North America and elsewhere after the World War II. By drawing primarily on International Council of Nurses refugee files, a picture can be pieced together of the fate that befell many of those women who left Russia and later the Soviet Union because of revolution and war in the years after 1917. The history of first (after World War I) and second (after World War II) wave émigré nurses, integrated into the broader historical narrative, reveals that professional identity was just as important to these women as national identity. This became especially so after World War II, when Russian and Soviet refugee nurses resettled in the West. Individual accounts become interwoven on an international canvas that brings together a wide range of personal experiences from women based in Russia, the Soviet Union, China, Yugoslavia, Canada, the United States, and elsewhere. The commonality of experience among Russian nurses as they attempted to establish their professional identities highlights, through the prism of Russia, the importance of the history of the displaced nurse experience in the wider context of international migration history.

Chinese Women’s History: Global Circuits, Local meanings

Recent Chinese women’s history focuses on the production of globally-inflected, locally situated Chinese knowledge about modernity, the gendered body, and female selfhood. This article explores three particularly fertile areas of research that explore various facets of this global/local nexus while challenging broader historical narratives and expanding the existing historical archive. The first is the emergence at the turn of the twentieth century of a feminist analytics of reform that defies conventional notions of Chinese modernity. The second is the theorization and practice of women’s medicine from the imperial through the communist eras that highlights the singularity of Chinese conceptions of the gendered body and the social status of the female healer. The third is the uncovering of non-textual avenues to—and the questioning of the very premises of—Chinese women’s historical experience through oral history and visual sources.

The Problem South: Region, Empire, and the New Liberal State, 1880–1930 by Natalie J. Ring (review)

Reviewed by: The Problem South: Region, Empire, and the New Liberal State, 1880–1930 by Natalie J. Ring Erin Clune (bio) The Problem South: Region, Empire, and the New Liberal State, 1880–1930. By Natalie J. Ring. (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2012. Pp. 349. Cloth, $69.96; paper, $24.95.) One of the enduring debates in postbellum scholarship concerns the question of southern distinctiveness: the extent to which the “New South” [End Page 431] was different and separate, both from the society that preceded it and the one that shared its northern border. As Howard Rabinowitz once observed, scholars have approached these questions with a variety of conceptual frameworks and “categories in which to help package the past.”1 Given their different frames of reference, it’s not surprising that historians have also reached widely divergent conclusions about the nature of southern change and the meaning of national reconciliation. In The Problem South, Natalie Ring sheds creative new light on this long-standing debate. Her primary frame of reference is not really the South, in the sense that she doesn’t assess the vitality of the southern economy, the fairness of the political landscape, or everyday struggles over developing laws of segregation. Yet she does weigh in. Alongside the trend toward sectional reunification around the turn of the century, Ring says, there was a “broader historical narrative about the South’s differentness from the nation. An equally powerful and opposing set of representations of the South as a backward region played counterpoint to the nostalgic image of the reconciled New South” (5–6). The architects of that narrative, she says, were a collection of mostly northern reformers, philanthropists, and social scientists who drew attention to what was commonly known as the “southern problem.” Ring’s book is a study of these reformers and their aspiration to “readjust” the South. And in that sense, her main frame of reference is the growth of the Progressive Era state. The notion that northern liberals wanted to reform the South isn’t a new finding. What makes Ring’s study unique is that she considers that reformist impulse in more cohesive terms and puts their southern story in conversation with scholarship about the growth of the modern state. Looking at southern distinctiveness primarily in discursive and representational terms—rather than tangible, historical ones—the author avers that the South was a paradox of progress and poverty. But it was a paradox that northern reformers also constructed—at least in part—as they worked to entrench their corporate liberal values. As Ring notes, “The consolidation of early twentieth-century liberalism entailed the creation of a persuasive image of regional backwardness that could then be resolved through economic and social reform” (6). As Ring’s chapters demonstrate, the reformist ambition to fix the South expressed itself through various organizational initiatives and cultural discussions—around public health and disease, agriculture, education, and race. Broadly speaking, many of these topics have been standard yardsticks in the change/continuity debate. Yet Ring is mainly interested in the ways they served the reformist agenda of “reshaping the South in the likeness of the North” (131). In her chapter on King Cotton, for example, [End Page 432] she explores the career of Seaman A. Knapp, the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s special agent for the promotion of agriculture in the South, who traveled through the South to promote his farm demonstration program and to teach farmers the techniques of “scientific” agriculture. In a larger sense, Ring writes, “the rural uplift of the South inevitably made for better national democratic citizens as well as contributed to the economic welfare of the nation” (130). In her chapter on education, the author identifies a similarly nationalist agenda behind familiar efforts like the General Education Board and the Ogden movement. Such reforms, Ring argues, “underscored the imperative need to educate white children in preparation for assuming their roles as white citizens in the American nation-state” (173). While The Problem South repackages southern distinctiveness as a political tool of national elites, it also argues that this Progressive impulse had an important global dimension. Northern reformers reinforced their narrative of distinctiveness through reference to...

The Perilous Life of Symphony Orchestras: Artistic Triumphs and Economic Challenges by Robert J. Flanagan (review)

MUSIC AND MARKETS The Perilous Life of Symphony Orchestras: Artistic Triumphs and Economic Challenges. By Robert J. Flanagan. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2012. [vii, 224 p. ISBN 9780300171938. $50.] Illustrations, bibliography, index.During the recent global financial crisis, businesses once accustomed to hefty profits were suddenly reporting unprecedented losses. Not surprisingly, nonprofit performing arts organizations faced an even grimmer reality, facing untenable funding cuts that threatened to deplete an already fragile resource base. The challenges facing symphony orchestras are particularly acute. In the last decade nearly a dozen orchestras have filed for bankruptcy, while countless more have grappled with the day-to-day realities associated with producing and presenting symphonic concerts. Nevertheless, many of these organizations continue to exceed artistic expectations, overcoming financial constraints to create art of remarkable breadth and quality. Robert Flanagan's new book explores the paradox between these artistic triumphs and economic shortfalls, shining an analytical light on the challenges facing orchestras in the twenty-first century. His argument-that this is not a new phenomenon caused by a sputtering economy, but instead the result of an outdated organizational structure- challenges musicians, administrators, policy makers, and audiences to rethink the role orchestras play in contemporary society.Flanagan's background as an avowed amateur musician and award-winning economist orients this study, which nests a series of statistical analyses within a broader historical narrative that traces the causes and consequences of the orchestra's current structure. Although he devotes some attention to how orchestras operate in Europe, he primarily examines orchestras in their American context, drawing on data from the League of American Orchestras and other industry sources to identify and analyze trends from the fifty largest U.S. ensembles (by budget size) between 1987 and 2005. The analysis is presented in a way that is easy to understand, limiting financial jargon to a minimum and placing more indepth explanations of statistical procedures in the book's appendices. A study that could have easily become a dry research report reads more often as a compelling story with significant practical implications. Important points are reinforced with pie charts and other graphics, and results are supplemented with a rich and relatively balanced collection of quotes drawn from industry experts. As a whole, the book provides an easily digestible narrative that should be of interest to orchestra scholars, administrators, and audiences.Before reviewing the content of Flanagan's findings in more detail, it is worth asking what's new here. The economic challenges confronting orchestras today have been the subject of considerable attention and research for some time, due in part to the complex amalgam of individual philanthropy, foundation grants, government support, and ticket sales that support orchestras' operations. The present study is rooted conceptually in research undertaken by two Princeton economists, who in 1966 identified and investigated the cost disease associated with the live performing arts (William Baumol and William Bowen, Performing Arts-The Economic Dilemma [Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1966]). Flanagan's analysis does little to build on these findings, although his focus on the orchestra and use of updated data yield several new insights. Moreover, much of the material presented in Flanagan's book comes directly from a report prepared for the Andrew W. Mellon Founda - tion (Robert J. Flanagan, Report to Andrew W. Mellon Foundation: The Economic Environ ment of American Symphony Orchestras [New York: Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, March 2008]; see http://www.gsb.stanford.edu /news/packages/pdf/Flanagan.pdf, accessed 15 September 2012). The Mellon Foundation, along with a group of industry stakeholders coined the Elephant Task Force, hired Flanagan in 2008 to assess the financial challenges facing contemporary orchestras. …

From Corn to Casinos: The Catch-22 of Native American Afluence

From Corn to Casinos:The Catch-22 of Native American Afluence Andrew H. Fisher (bio) Alexandra Harmon . Rich Indians: Native People and the Problem of Wealth in American History. University of North Carolina Press, 2010. x + 388 pp. Photographs, notes, bibliography, and index. $39.95. Indian-head nickels aside, Native Americans and money don't mix well in the public imagination. From Henri Rousseau's "Discourse on Inequality" to Kevin Costner's Dances with Wolves, Indians have often served as foils for the greed and materialism of the "White Man." At the same time, Euro-Americans have lamented Native American poverty while lambasting tribal enterprises they deem excessively profitable, morally inappropriate, or simply "un-Indian." The result is a Catch-22 worthy of Joseph Heller's classic novel, in which the character Chief White Halfoat complains that his Creek family had unwittingly served as "human divining rods" for Oklahoma oilmen. Ultimately, he tells Yossarian, "we found ourselves completely surrounded by oilmen waiting for us to come their way so they could kick us off. Everywhere you looked there was an oilman on a ridge, waiting there like Indians getting ready to attack. It was the end." Perhaps the White Halfoats were lucky, for being stripped of their oil wealth spared them the ignominy of becoming rich Indians, the subject of Alexandra Harmon's latest book. "From many chapters of their history," writes Harmon, "Indians could reasonably conclude that they were damned if they did get rich and damned if they did not" (p. 277). She uses seven case studies of unexpected Native affluence (including the Oklahoma oil boom) to explore the intersection of American ideas about economics and Indians. Whether fighting over corn in colonial Virginia or casinos in modern Connecticut, Harmon contends, whites and Indians have debated and influenced each other's views on the proper sources, distribution, and purposes of wealth. This intercultural discourse reveals more than just competing notions of Indianness; in Harmon's skilled hands, it becomes both a divining rod for locating "the moral premises of economic culture" (p. 10) and a wedge for fitting Indians into broader historical narratives. Impressive in scope and analytical power, her book makes a compelling case for the proposition that a "historical examination of American [End Page 186] thought regarding economic morality is . . . incomplete unless it includes Indians" (p. 11). Rich Indians is part of a new wave of scholarship that aims to move Native economic history beyond its usual fixation on dispossession, dependency, and underdevelopment. Over the past fifteen years, anthropologists and historians have produced more nuanced interpretations of Indian engagement with the market economy, emphasizing adaptation and agency over exploitation and subjection. While acknowledging the power imbalances and structural constraints that have limited Native choices, these studies generally portray Indians as intelligent economic actors with culturally distinct yet dynamic perceptions and practices. Theda Perdue and Claudio Saunt, among others, have documented changing conceptions of property within the "Five Civilized Tribes" in the decades preceding removal. Scholars such as Brian Hosmer, Peter Iverson, and Colleen O'Neill have uncovered examples of Indian entrepreneurship that challenge the notion that capitalism necessarily undermined Native cultural values. Even wage labor—long taken as a hallmark of dependency—has been productively reassessed in case studies by William Bauer, Paige Raibmon, and Daniel Usner. Rich Indians is most like Usner's Indian Work: Language and Livelihood in Native American History (2009) in its attention to the reciprocal relationship between the economic strategies that Indians have adopted and the discursive strategies that white observers have used to discredit them. Euro-American greed and hypocrisy receive due attention, but Harmon shares with these authors the desire to transcend simple stories of victimization. Instead of a morality play about selfish whites and generous Natives, she offers a satisfyingly complex drama in which neither side has a monopoly on virtue. Harmon's vignettes span American history from the colonial period to the present. Fittingly, she starts in seventeenth-century Virginia, where the "trope of the poor savage" (p. 53) took root with the plantations that displaced Native towns. From the outset, while Anglo observations of Powhatan culture were "contradictory and ambivalent" (p. 27), they generally described Indians...

Reflections on the Holocaust and Jewish History

Reflections on the Holocaust and Jewish History Alexandra Garbarini David Engel . Historians of the Jews and the Holocaust. Stanford Studies in Jewish History and Culture. Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2010. Pp. xvii + 314. David Engel's Historians of the Jews and the Holocaust is a timely reflection on the state of the field. Or, as it turns out, on the state of two fields, for he traces how Holocaust history and Jewish history have developed "as two separate realms, each with its own rules and practices, whose border is not readily crossed" (p. ix). Engel amasses evidence that shows how marginal the Holocaust has proven to be within the academic study of modern Jewish history. As others who have written about Engel's book have already pointed out, this fact will surprise "the man on the Tel-Aviv omnibus" and others outside the field of Jewish history.1 I suspect it may even surprise those working on perpetrator studies within the field of Holocaust history. But to historians of Jewish history and to those writing about Jewish experiences during the Holocaust, Engel's book renders what perhaps appeared to them as anecdote into a discernible pattern. Whereas the Holocaust has been central in "popular understandings of Jewish history," in Jewish theology and religious thought, and in the humanities overall, it has had next to no impact on historians' conceptualizations [End Page 81] and interpretations of the course of Jewish history.2 To Engel, the manner in which historians of the Jews have responded to the epistemological, theological, and moral challenges posed by the Holocaust is both a paradox and a missed opportunity. In setting the Holocaust outside Jewish history and thereby attempting to preserve the "normality" of the course of Jewish history as a whole, historians of the Jews have cast their own field as an outsider to some of the most vibrant and important conversations among contemporary academics (pp. 41-42). Engel does not simply demonstrate that scholars of Jewish history have recoiled from studying the Holocaust. He offers a history of Jewish historiography from the 1920s to the present in an effort to explain why scholars in North America and Israel who subscribed to different ideological positions and belonged to different generations have continued to eschew investigating a—if not the—crucially important event in twentieth-century Jewish history (p. xii). Thus, Engel conducts an internal reading. His initial premise that Jewish historians have responded differently than other historians to the challenges posed by the Holocaust becomes the justification for the approach he has taken in this study. He insists that one can and should study this move of Jewish historians to "sequester" the Holocaust as an investigation of that particular historiographical tradition, of its discourse and of the "internal Jewish sociocommunal context to which that discourse is linked" (p. 42). The explanation Engel offers for the origins of Jewish historians' attitude toward the Holocaust is compelling. But as he himself concedes at several junctures in his book, there are other ways to account for the wall that historians of the Jews have constructed between the Holocaust and Jewish history. Here, I want to raise questions about historical methodology, narrative, and conceptual vocabulary that complement Engel's argument. The fractured relationship between studies of Jews and of the Holocaust needs also to be understood in terms of broader issues in the writing of Holocaust history rather than solely within the context of historians of the Jews' failure to integrate Holocaust history into modern Jewish history. These issues emerge clearly in attempting to construct a broad historical narrative about Jewish experiences during the Holocaust. While it may be the case that historians of the Jews have lagged behind other historians in turning their attention to the Holocaust, understanding why they have done so also requires looking beyond Jewish historiography. [End Page 82] It bears mentioning what is by now widely known and recognized: historians of modern Europe long marginalized the Holocaust in their studies of the Third Reich and the World War II era. It was only after several transformations in the realm of consciousness, brought about by political and cultural events, particularly in the 1980s, and in...

Changing Perspectives in Australian Archaeology, part III. Hidden in plain view—the Sydney Aboriginal Historical Places Project

Post-contact Aboriginal archaeology is a relatively new but growing discipline in Australia, though most work has been focussed on non-urban areas. A scoping study initiated in 2006 sought to determine the viability of an historical and archaeological research project in Sydney, Australia’s oldest and largest urban centre. Such research has not been previously attempted in a systematic way, due to the assumed high impact of European settlement on the region’s post contact Aboriginal archaeology. The study has shown this not to be the case, combining the records of previous archaeological and historical research to create a spatial database of 280 post-contact Aboriginal places within the Sydney region. Preliminary analysis of this data has shown some interesting trends in the location and nature of these places, which suggest further research could be of significant value to the interpretation of post-contact Aboriginal history and the nature of cross-cultural interactions in urban centres, as well as pre-contact archaeology and traditional Aboriginal life in the region. The Sydney Aboriginal Historical Places Project has been formed to progress this research in conjunction with local Aboriginal communities in the Sydney region. IrIsh, Paul, 2011. Changing perspectives in Australian archaeology, part III. Hidden in plain view—the Sydney Aboriginal Historical Places Project. Technical Reports of the Australian Museum, Online 23(3): 31–44. A number of post-contact Aboriginal places in Sydney are easily visible if you know what to look for. Some are remembered and still used by Aboriginal people today and a few are relatively well-known amongst the interested public (e.g., Hinkson, 2010). The vast majority, however, feature only as a brief historical reference or as an archaeological site record in a government archive. Growing interest in the postcontact Aboriginal history of Sydney reflects a realization that such research is essential to for a better understanding of the development of Sydney as a city and as the largest and oldest urban centre in Australia, and follows a more general trend to incorporate Aboriginal history into broader historical narratives (Curthoys, 2008). Although archaeological data can provide an important spatial and physical aspect to that history, they have largely been ignored. Historical Aboriginal places warrant further investigation on these grounds alone, but can also answer questions about pre-contact archaeology and the nature of traditional Aboriginal culture in the region. They are also valued by Aboriginal people as tangible proof of the survival of Aboriginal people through several centuries of European occupation, and deserve the same protection as pre-contact Aboriginal archaeological “sites”, which also require research. Despite these things, most Aboriginal historical places have not been investigated due to the difficulty of collating the disparate source material as well as the nature of archaeological training and heritage management practice in Australia. More so than in more remote areas, post-contact archaeology in urban centres requires the disciplines of history and archaeology; however, most archaeologists are not trained or experienced in both disciplines. Hence, few have attempted, or been capable of, integrating the historical

‘Carrying on a Long Tradition’

The close relationship between feminism and history has resulted in peaks in the production of feminist histories which coincide with high levels of feminist activity. In many instances, feminists have conceived the research and writing of history as a political act in itself. This article investigates some of the contradictions and omissions which can arise when feminism attempts to engage with its own past. Though a close examination of the coverage of the suffrage movement in the British feminist periodical Spare Rib, the article considers the difficulties of constructing alternative versions of history and of integrating new knowledge into broader historical narratives.